There is no kind of false wit which has been so recommended by the
practice of all ages as that which consists in a jingle of words, and is
comprehended under the general name of punning. It is indeed impossible
to kill a weed which the soil has a natural disposition to produce. The
seeds of punning are in the minds of all men, and though they may be
subdued by reason, reflection, and good sense, they will be very apt to
shoot up in the greatest genius that is not broken and cultivated by the
rules of art. Imitation is natural to us, and when it does not raise the
mind to poetry, painting, music, or other more noble arts, it often
breaks out in puns and quibbles.
Aristotle, in the eleventh chapter of his book of rhetoric, describes two
or three kinds of puns, which he calls paragrams, among the beauties of
good writing, and produces instances of them out of some of the greatest
authors in the Greek tongue. Cicero has sprinkled several of his works
with puns, and, in his book where he lays down the rules of oratory,
quotes abundance of sayings as pieces of wit, which also, upon
examination, prove arrant puns. But the age in which the pun chiefly
flourished was in the reign of King James the First. That learned
monarch was himself a tolerable punster, and made very few bishops or
Privy Councillors that had not some time or other signalised themselves
by a clinch, or a conundrum. It was, therefore, in this age that the pun
appeared with pomp and dignity. It had been before admitted into merry
speeches and ludicrous compositions, but was now delivered with great
gravity from the pulpit, or pronounced in the most solemn manner at the
council-table. The greatest authors, in their most serious works, made
frequent use of puns. The sermons of Bishop Andrews, and the tragedies
of Shakespeare, are full of them. The sinner was punned into repentance
by the former; as in the latter, nothing is more usual than to see a hero
weeping and quibbling for a dozen lines together.
I must add to these great authorities, which seem to have given a kind of
sanction to this piece of false wit, that all the writers of rhetoric
have treated of punning with very great respect, and divided the several
kinds of it into hard names, that are reckoned among the figures of
speech, and recommended as ornaments in discourse. I remember a country
schoolmaster of my acquaintance told me once, that he had been in company
with a gentleman whom he looked upon to be the greatest paragrammatist
among the moderns. Upon inquiry, I found my learned friend had dined
that day with Mr. Swan, the famous punster; and desiring him to give me
some account of Mr. Swan's conversation, he told me that he generally
talked in the _Paranomasia_, that he sometimes gave in to the _Ploce_,
but that in his humble opinion he shone most in the _Antanaclasis_.
I must not here omit that a famous university of this land was formerly
very much infested with puns; but whether or not this might arise from
the fens and marshes in which it was situated, and which are now drained,
I must leave to the determination of more skilful naturalists.
After this short history of punning, one would wonder how it should be so
entirely banished out of the learned world as it is at present,
especially since it had found a place in the writings of the most ancient
polite authors. To account for this we must consider that the first race
of authors, who were the great heroes in writing, were destitute of all
rules and arts of criticism; and for that reason, though they excel later
writers in greatness of genius, they fall short of them in accuracy and
correctness. The moderns cannot reach their beauties, but can avoid
their imperfections. When the world was furnished with these authors of
the first eminence, there grew up another set of writers, who gained
themselves a reputation by the remarks which they made on the works of
those who preceded them. It was one of the employments of these
secondary authors to distinguish the several kinds of wit by terms of
art, and to consider them as more or less perfect, according as they were
founded in truth. It is no wonder, therefore, that even such authors as
Isocrates, Plato, and Cicero, should have such little blemishes as are
not to be met with in authors of a much inferior character, who have
written since those several blemishes were discovered. I do not find
that there was a proper separation made between puns and true wit by any
of the ancient authors, except Quintilian and Longinus. But when this
distinction was once settled, it was very natural for all men of sense to
agree in it. As for the revival of this false wit, it happened about the
time of the revival of letters; but as soon as it was once detected, it
immediately vanished and disappeared. At the same time there is no
question but, as it has sunk in one age and rose in another, it will
again recover itself in some distant period of time, as pedantry and
ignorance shall prevail upon wit and sense. And, to speak the truth, I
do very much apprehend, by some of the last winter's productions, which
had their sets of admirers, that our posterity will in a few years
degenerate into a race of punsters: at least, a man may be very excusable
for any apprehensions of this kind, that has seen acrostics handed about
the town with great secresy and applause; to which I must also add a
little epigram called the "Witches' Prayer," that fell into verse when it
was read either backward or forward, excepting only that it cursed one
way, and blessed the other. When one sees there are actually such
painstakers among our British wits, who can tell what it may end in? If
we must lash one another, let it be with the manly strokes of wit and
satire: for I am of the old philosopher's opinion, that, if I must suffer
from one or the other, I would rather it should be from the paw of a lion
than from the hoof of an ass. I do not speak this out of any spirit of
party. There is a most crying dulness on both sides. I have seen Tory
acrostics and Whig anagrams, and do not quarrel with either of them
because they are Whigs or Tories, but because they are anagrams and
acrostics.
But to return to punning. Having pursued the history of a pun, from its
original to its downfall, I shall here define it to be a conceit arising
from the use of two words that agree in the sound, but differ in the
sense. The only way, therefore, to try a piece of wit is to translate it
into a different language. If it bears the test, you may pronounce it
true; but if it vanishes in the experiment, you may conclude it to have
been a pun. In short, one may say of a pun, as the countryman described
his nightingale, that it is "_vox et praeterea nihil_"--"a sound, and
nothing but a sound." On the contrary, one may represent true wit by the
description which Aristaenetus makes of a fine woman:--"When she is
dressed she is beautiful: when she is undressed she is beautiful;" or, as
Mercerus has translated it more emphatically, _Induitur_, _formosa est_:
_exuitur_, _ipsa forma est_.
Fifth Paper.
_Scribendi recte sapere est et principium_, _et fons_.
HOR., _Ars Poet._ 309.
Sound judgment is the ground of writing well.--ROSCOMMON.
Mr. Locke has an admirable reflection upon the difference of wit and
judgment, whereby he endeavours to show the reason why they are not
always the talents of the same person. His words are as follow:--"And
hence, perhaps, may be given some reason of that common observation,
'That men who have a great deal of wit, and prompt memories, have not
always the clearest judgment or deepest reason.' For wit lying most in
the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and
variety wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to
make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy: judgment,
on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully
one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference,
thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one
thing for another. This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to
metaphor and allusion, wherein, for the most part, lies that
entertainment and pleasantry of wit which strikes so lively on the fancy,
and is therefore so acceptable to all people."
This is, I think, the best and most philosophical account that I have
ever met with of wit, which generally, though not always, consists in
such a resemblance and congruity of ideas as this author mentions. I
shall only add to it, by way of explanation, that every resemblance of
ideas is not that which we call wit, unless it be such an one that gives
delight and surprise to the reader. These two properties seem essential
to wit, more particularly the last of them. In order, therefore, that
the resemblance in the ideas be wit, it is necessary that the ideas
should not lie too near one another in the nature of things; for, where
the likeness is obvious, it gives no surprise. To compare one man's
singing to that of another, or to represent the whiteness of any object
by that of milk and snow, or the variety of its colours by those of the
rainbow, cannot be called wit, unless, besides this obvious resemblance,
there be some further congruity discovered in the two ideas that is
capable of giving the reader some surprise. Thus, when a poet tells us
the bosom of his mistress is as white as snow, there is no wit in the
comparison; but when he adds, with a sigh, it is as cold too, it then
grows into wit. Every reader's memory may supply him with innumerable
instances of the same nature. For this reason, the similitudes in heroic
poets, who endeavour rather to fill the mind with great conceptions than
to divert it with such as are new and surprising, have seldom anything in
them that can be called wit. Mr. Locke's account of wit, with this short
explanation, comprehends most of the species of wit, as metaphors,
similitudes, allegories, enigmas, mottoes, parables, fables, dreams,
visions, dramatic writings, burlesque, and all the methods of allusion:
as there are many other pieces of wit, how remote soever they may appear
at first sight from the foregoing description, which upon examination
will be found to agree with it.
As true wit generally consists in this resemblance and congruity of
ideas, false wit chiefly consists in the resemblance and congruity
sometimes of single letters, as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, and
acrostics; sometimes of syllables, as in echoes and doggrel rhymes;
sometimes of words, as in puns and quibbles; and sometimes of whole
sentences or poems, cast into the figures of eggs, axes, or altars; nay,
some carry the notion of wit so far as to ascribe it even to external
mimicry, and to look upon a man as an ingenious person that can resemble
the tone, posture, or face of another.
As true wit consists in the resemblance of ideas, and false wit in the
resemblance of words, according to the foregoing instances, there is
another kind of wit which consists partly in the resemblance of ideas and
partly in the resemblance of words, which for distinction sake I shall
call mixed wit. This kind of wit is that which abounds in Cowley more
than in any author that ever wrote. Mr. Waller has likewise a great deal
of it. Mr. Dryden is very sparing in it. Milton had a genius much above
it. Spenser is in the same class with Milton. The Italians, even in
their epic poetry, are full of it. Monsieur Boileau, who formed himself
upon the ancient poets, has everywhere rejected it with scorn. If we
look after mixed wit among the Greek writers, we shall find it nowhere
but in the epigrammatists. There are indeed some strokes of it in the
little poem ascribed to Musaeus, which by that as well as many other
marks betrays itself to be a modern composition. If we look into the
Latin writers we find none of this mixed wit in Virgil, Lucretius, or
Catullus; very little in Horace, but a great deal of it in Ovid, and
scarce anything else in Martial.
Out of the innumerable branches of mixed wit, I shall choose one instance
which may be met with in all the writers of this class. The passion of
love in its nature has been thought to resemble fire, for which reason
the words "fire" and "flame" are made use of to signify love. The witty
poets, therefore, have taken an advantage, from the doubtful meaning of
the word "fire," to make an infinite number of witticisms. Cowley
observing the cold regard of his mistress's eyes, and at the same time
the power of producing love in him, considers them as burning-glasses
made of ice; and, finding himself able to live in the greatest
extremities of love, concludes the torrid zone to be habitable. When his
mistress has read his letter written in juice of lemon, by holding it to
the fire, he desires her to read it over a second time by love's flames.
When she weeps, he wishes it were inward heat that distilled those drops
from the limbec. When she is absent, he is beyond eighty, that is,
thirty degrees nearer the pole than when she is with him. His ambitious
love is a fire that naturally mounts upwards; his happy love is the beams
of heaven, and his unhappy love flames of hell. When it does not let him
sleep, it is a flame that sends up no smoke; when it is opposed by
counsel and advice, it is a fire that rages the more by the winds blowing
upon it. Upon the dying of a tree, in which he had cut his loves, he
observes that his written flames had burnt up and withered the tree. When
he resolves to give over his passion, he tells us that one burnt like him
for ever dreads the fire. His heart is an AEtna, that, instead of
Vulcan's shop, encloses Cupid's forge in it. His endeavouring to drown
his love in wine is throwing oil upon the fire. He would insinuate to
his mistress that the fire of love, like that of the sun, which produces
so many living creatures, should not only warm, but beget. Love in
another place cooks Pleasure at his fire. Sometimes the poet's heart is
frozen in every breast, and sometimes scorched in every eye. Sometimes
he is drowned in tears and burnt in love, like a ship set on fire in the
middle of the sea.
The reader may observe in every one of these instances that the poet
mixes the qualities of fire with those of love; and in the same sentence,
speaking of it both as a passion and as real fire, surprises the reader
with those seeming resemblances or contradictions that make up all the
wit in this kind of writing. Mixed wit, therefore, is a composition of
pun and true wit, and is more or less perfect as the resemblance lies in
the ideas or in the words. Its foundations are laid partly in falsehood
and partly in truth; reason puts in her claim for one half of it, and
extravagance for the other. The only province, therefore, for this kind
of wit is epigram, or those little occasional poems that in their own
nature are nothing else but a tissue of epigrams. I cannot conclude this
head of mixed wit without owning that the admirable poet, out of whom I
have taken the examples of it, had as much true wit as any author that
ever wrote; and indeed all other talents of an extraordinary genius.
It may be expected, since I am upon this subject, that I should take
notice of Mr. Dryden's definition of wit, which, with all the deference
that is due to the judgment of so great a man, is not so properly a
definition of wit as of good writing in general. Wit, as he defines it,
is "a propriety of words and thoughts adapted to the subject." If this
be a true definition of wit, I am apt to think that Euclid was the
greatest wit that ever set pen to paper. It is certain there never was a
greater propriety of words and thoughts adapted to the subject than what
that author has made use of in his Elements. I shall only appeal to my
reader if this definition agrees with any notion he has of wit. If it be
a true one, I am sure Mr. Dryden was not only a better poet, but a
greater wit than Mr. Cowley, and Virgil a much more facetious man than
either Ovid or Martial.
Bouhours, whom I look upon to be the most penetrating of all the French
critics, has taken pains to show that it is impossible for any thought to
be beautiful which is not just, and has not its foundation in the nature
of things; that the basis of all wit is truth; and that no thought can be
valuable of which good sense is not the groundwork. Boileau has
endeavoured to inculcate the same notion in several parts of his
writings, both in prose and verse. This is that natural way of writing,
that beautiful simplicity which we so much admire in the compositions of
the ancients, and which nobody deviates from but those who want strength
of genius to make a thought shine in its own natural beauties. Poets who
want this strength of genius to give that majestic simplicity to nature,
which we so much admire in the works of the ancients, are forced to hunt
after foreign ornaments, and not to let any piece of wit of what kind
soever escape them. I look upon these writers as Goths in poetry, who,
like those in architecture, not being able to come up to the beautiful
simplicity of the old Greeks and Romans, have endeavoured to supply its
place with all the extravagancies of an irregular fancy. Mr. Dryden
makes a very handsome observation on Ovid's writing a letter from Dido to
AEneas, in the following words: "Ovid," says he, speaking of Virgil's
fiction of Dido and AEneas, "takes it up after him, even in the same age,
and makes an ancient heroine of Virgil's new-created Dido; dictates a
letter for her just before her death to the ungrateful fugitive, and,
very unluckily for himself, is for measuring a sword with a man so much
superior in force to him on the same subject. I think I may be judge of
this, because I have translated both. The famous author of 'The Art of
Love' has nothing of his own; he borrows all from a greater master in his
own profession, and, which is worse, improves nothing which he finds.
Nature fails him; and, being forced to his old shift, he has recourse to
witticism. This passes indeed with his soft admirers, and gives him the
preference to Virgil in their esteem."
Were not I supported by so great an authority as that of Mr. Dryden, I
should not venture to observe that the taste of most of our English
poets, as well as readers, is extremely Gothic. He quotes Monsieur
Segrais for a threefold distinction of the readers of poetry; in the
first of which he comprehends the rabble of readers, whom he does not
treat as such with regard to their quality, but to their numbers and the
coarseness of their taste. His words are as follows: "Segrais has
distinguished the readers of poetry, according to their capacity of
judging, into three classes." [He might have said the same of writers
too if he had pleased.] "In the lowest form he places those whom he
calls Les Petits Esprits, such things as our upper-gallery audience in a
playhouse, who like nothing but the husk and rind of wit, and prefer a
quibble, a conceit, an epigram, before solid sense and elegant
expression. These are mob readers. If Virgil and Martial stood for
Parliament-men, we know already who would carry it. But though they made
the greatest appearance in the field, and cried the loudest, the best of
it is they are but a sort of French Huguenots, or Dutch boors, brought
over in herds, but not naturalised: who have not lands of two pounds per
annum in Parnassus, and therefore are not privileged to poll. Their
authors are of the same level, fit to represent them on a mountebank's
stage, or to be masters of the ceremonies in a bear-garden; yet these are
they who have the most admirers. But it often happens, to their
mortification, that as their readers improve their stock of sense, as
they may by reading better books, and by conversation with men of
judgment, they soon forsake them."
I must not dismiss this subject without observing that, as Mr. Locke, in
the passage above-mentioned, has discovered the most fruitful source of
wit, so there is another of a quite contrary nature to it, which does
likewise branch itself into several kinds. For not only the resemblance,
but the opposition of ideas does very often produce wit, as I could show
in several little points, turns, and antitheses that I may possibly
enlarge upon in some future speculation.
Sixth Paper.
_Humano capiti cervicem pictor equinam_
_Jungere si velit_, _et varias inducere plumas_,
_Undique collatis membris_, _ut turpiter atrum_
_Desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne_;
_Spectatum admissi risum teneatis_, _amici_?
_Credite_, _Pisones_, _isti tabulae_, _fore librum_
_Persimilem_, _cujus_, _velut aegri somnia_, _vanae_
_Fingentur species_.
HOR., _Ars Poet._ 1.
If in a picture, Piso, you should see
A handsome woman with a fish's tail,
Or a man's head upon a horse's neck,
Or limbs of beasts, of the most different kinds,
Cover'd with feathers of all sorts of birds,--
Would you not laugh, and think the painter mad?
Trust me, that book is as ridiculous
Whose incoherent style, like sick men's dreams,
Varies all shapes, and mixes all extremes.